Amid the smoking ruins of what was once a thriving magical district, Aries Beaufort stood bloodied but unbroken. At eighteen, he was already a veteran of a war that had burned away his youth, leaving something harder and colder in its place. Bodies of allies and enemies alike littered the battlefield—the final, brutal cost of a conflict that began with idealism and would end in necessary slaughter.
His wand, an extension of his will, remained trained on the most dangerous wizard in a century.
Gellert Grindelwald regarded him with heterochromatic eyes—one piercing blue, the other a stormy gray—that mirrored Aries's own. It was like looking into a warped mirror, seeing the same steel-gray intensity, the same formidable intelligence. But where Aries's gaze held the weary determination of a soldier, Grindelwald's burned with a chilling, disappointed pride.
"You disappoint me, my boy," Grindelwald's voice carried effortlessly over the crackle of dying fires, a calm lecture amidst the carnage. "Such power flows in your veins—our power. The magic of creation and death itself. Together, we could have scoured the rot from this broken world, elevated it from the chaos of lesser minds." His lips curved in a smile that held no warmth, only the cold certainty of his conviction. "Instead, you throw your lot in with the very sheep who would see us all burn rather than accept the natural order. Tell me, Aries…" he gestured with one elegant hand to the fallen, "…when you look upon the faces of our people, slain by your own hand, do you still believe in their precious equality?"
Aries responded not with words, but with a language Grindelwald would understand better. A low growl emanated from the shadows around him as they writhed to his command, the whispers of the battlefield's dead rising in a mournful shriek. The air grew heavy, charged with ozone and power . His custom-forged mithril staff, held tight in his left hand, ignited at the tip. Black flame, a void that devoured light itself, erupted forth, screaming toward his grandfather.
Grindelwald met the attack with a contemptuous flick of his own wand. A beam of brilliant, golden light, pure and absolute, met the encroaching darkness. The collision was a beautiful, terrible nova of opposing forces—a display of power that few wizards in history could ever hope to match.
But even as his magic roared to life, Aries felt the familiar hollow ache in his chest—the part of him that died a little more with each life he was forced to take.
He's not wrong about what I've become, the thought echoed in the quiet corners of his mind. The terrified boy who woke up in this world, determined to save everyone… when did he become this? A killer in a field of corpses?
As their magic tore at the fabric of reality between them—grandfather and grandson, two sides of the same deadly coin—a truth he'd suppressed for years bled through his carefully constructed defenses.
I told myself I was different. That my violence had purpose, that my choices were justified. He parried a curse that would have boiled the blood in his veins, the motion automatic, honed by a thousand duels. But standing here, looking into eyes that could be my own… maybe the capacity for this was always in me. Maybe that's why his philosophy was never truly alien. Why his arguments felt so seductive.
Was it the life he'd lived before? The cold logic that had been his shield? Or was it something deeper, something in the blood that now sang with dark power inside him?
"He offered me everything," he muttered to himself, the words lost in the storm. "Power, purpose, a world remade. And I chose this. Blood on my hands and the weight of necessary sins."
In a world of killers, you become one to survive. The logic was inescapable, brutal, and true.
Or perhaps… this is who I always was.
"The Portland deployment is showing a 23% efficiency gain. Traffic flow optimization is exceeding all projections."
Sarah's voice, bright with the particular joy reserved for when code works perfectly in production, cut through the low hum of the office. Aries—no, Magnus—grinned from behind his triple-monitor setup, pushing back from his standing desk. At thirty-one, he sometimes felt like he was just playing dress-up as a CEO, but moments like this reminded him why he'd fought so hard to build NexusCore from nothing.
"That's what I like to hear," he called back, raising his voice to address the entire floor. "Pizza's on me for lunch, everyone! We just made ten thousand commuters' lives a little less miserable."
A cheer went up. Marcus, their newest junior dev, actually whooped from his corner station where he'd been wrestling with a parking allocation algorithm all morning. Magnus walked over to David, his COO and the first person he'd ever hired. "Seattle rollout?"
"City council approved the pilot program," David said, eyes glued to his dual screens. "Downtown core, starting next month. Could be our biggest contract yet."
"Good. Make sure—"
The world stopped. A piercing, synthetic shriek cut through their conversation like a blade. Every phone, every computer, every smart device in the office screamed in unison with that bone-chilling emergency tone. Forty-five people froze, creating an eerie tableau of suspended motion.
EMERGENCY ALERT: INCOMING BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT TO YOUR AREA. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
"What the fuck?" someone whispered.
Magnus's brain kicked into crisis mode, the same systematic logic that had gotten him through foster care, through building this company, through every impossible problem he'd ever faced. "Everyone, stay calm!" his voice cut through the rising panic. "We have procedures. You all know them."
But alerts were already cascading across the screens. News notifications flooded his phone: MULTIPLE CITIES TARGETED. ESTIMATED IMPACT 18-22 MINUTES.
Sarah's face was ghost-white. "Boss, the basement here isn't rated for—"
"I know," Magnus cut her off. His mind was a blur of calculations. Building structural integrity: insufficient. Blast radius: unknown. Evacuation time: less than required. Success probability: approaching zero.
The sirens started outside, a cascade of wailing that seemed to claw at the sky. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, he saw chaos bloom on the streets below.
"Alright, listen up!" His CEO voice was steady, a rock in the torrent of fear. "Marcus, Jenny, get the junior team to the parking garage next door—it has better structural protection. Sarah, take your team to the Meridian building basement. Reinforced concrete. Go!"
"What about you?" David asked, grabbing his arm.
Magnus looked around the office—at the whiteboards covered in user flow diagrams, the awards on the walls, the family photos on every desk. Five years of his life. Forty-five people who trusted him. "I need to secure the servers," he lied smoothly. "Protect the client data. Go. That's an order."
Marcus, barely twenty-two, hesitated. "Boss, I can help—"
"No." Magnus's voice was firm. "Your mom is picking you up, remember? Go meet her. She'll be terrified."
The kid's eyes welled, but he nodded and ran. Sarah grabbed his shoulders, her grip fierce. "Magnus, there is nothing on those servers worth dying for."
He met her gaze. Sarah, who'd believed in him when NexusCore was just a dream in his studio apartment. "You're right," he said quietly. "I'm not staying for the servers."
Understanding, followed by fury, flashed across her face. "Don't you dare play hero," she whispered. "Don't you fucking dare." But she was already moving, shepherding the others, because she knew him. She knew the choice was already made.
In three minutes, the office was empty. Magnus sat at his desk, surrounded by forty-five empty chairs. Forty-five lives. Forty-five people who had trusted an orphan with a laptop and a dream. His fingers flew across the keyboard.
To: All Staff
Subject: See you on the other side.
He typed forty-five personal notes. Praise for their work. Jokes only they would understand. Reminders of their triumphs. His final email was to the entire team.
NexusCore wasn't built on code. It was built on the idea that orphaned systems—and orphaned people—can become part of something greater when they find the right connections. You are my greatest algorithm. You are my family. Take care of each other.
– Magnus
He hit 'Send All'.
Outside, the sirens were a single, deafening scream. Through the window, he saw a flash on the horizon. A second sun, hateful and white. His last thought wasn't of trajectories or blast radii, but of Sarah's laugh, of Marcus's excitement, of David's unwavering loyalty.
"I built something that mattered," he whispered to the empty office. "I built a family."
The shockwave hit. The world didn't go black. It simply disintegrated.
He floated in an endless, formless white. It took him a moment—or perhaps an eternity—to realize he was aware at all. This wasn't the clean, sterile white of a hospital, but the thick, suffocating white of a fog that muffled the world, pressing in from all sides, stealing breath he no longer had.
Where am I? The thought was a disembodied echo. He tried to move, to feel his own limbs, but there was nothing to command. He was a flicker of thought in an ocean of mist. Is this it, then? Is this what it is to be dead?
A sudden, violent pull answered him. It was the gut-wrenching sensation of a free fall into nothing. The pull intensified, and a detached corner of his mind watched in horror as the vague sense of his own form began to unravel. His edges frayed, dissolving into wisps of smoke, unspooling like thread from a loom.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced the fog. He tried to fight it, to impose order on the chaos. Stay calm. Just... stay calm. But the sensation was becoming painful, a deep, tearing ache as if his very soul was being unmade. This wasn't an end. It was a transition, and survival felt like a choice he was too small to make.
The ache caught fire. A slow, creeping heat built from a core he didn't possess, growing warmer, then hot, until he felt like a star igniting. Agony was absolute. He lost all sense of time as his consciousness shuddered, every phantom nerve screaming. He fought to hold onto his name, his memories, the man he had been, as the white void swirled into a vortex of unbearable light. Just as he felt the last vestiges of his identity about to burn away, to be lost in the inferno—
It stopped.
The pain, the heat, the light—all gone. All that remained was darkness, silence, and the ghost of a memory of fire.
And then, sensation.
He surfaced as if from the bottom of a deep, dark lake, consciousness returning with a slow, disorienting gasp. The air he drew felt thin and wrong.
Something's wrong.
The sheets beneath him were too soft. The room smelled of lavender and medicine, not the acrid smoke and ozone of his final moments. He tried to speak, to anchor himself with the sound of his own voice, but what emerged was a weak, pathetic whimper that wasn't his. He flexed his fingers and saw tiny, delicate digits respond in the dim light. The proportions, the sheer scale of everything, was nightmarishly wrong.
I'm dead, he thought, the old analytical part of his mind erecting a fragile wall against a tidal wave of panic. The missile hit. This is… a hallucination. The last firing of a dying brain.
But the sensations were too vivid, too consistent. The bone-deep exhaustion felt real. A cool, damp weight on his forehead felt real. His blurry vision gradually sharpened, revealing a sizable bedroom, elegantly decorated with ornate wooden furniture and tasteful, muted wallpaper. It had the quiet dignity of an old English manor. Beside the bed, a chair held a small, neat pile of children's storybooks.
A kid's bedroom? In Britain?
He struggled to sit up, his new body protesting with an alarming lack of strength. With a grunt of effort, he propped himself against the heavy, carved headboard. As he moved, the damp weight slipped from his forehead onto his lap. A folded washcloth. Someone had been tending to him.
He moved to pick it up and froze.
He stared at his hand. Then the other. He turned them over, his heart beginning to hammer a frantic, painful rhythm against ribs that felt too small. Where were the calluses from years of work? Where was the faint, silvery scar on his right pinky from a stupid accident in college? These hands were smooth, unblemished, the skin a pale, healthy tone he didn't recognize.
What the hell? A cold pit of dread opened in his stomach. He eased himself off the bed, his feet sinking into a plush carpet. The floor seemed impossibly far away. Carefully, his steps unsteady, he made his way to a tall, wooden dresser and gripped the edge, looking up at the mirror above it.
Reflected was a stranger. A child.
"Who the bloody hell is this?!" he whispered, the voice high and foreign.
The face was, disturbingly, a distorted echo of his own at that age, yet fundamentally different. The features were sharper, more defined. The hair was a soft, dark brown, lacking the unruly wave he'd inherited from his father. The eyes were still gray, but a darker, more intense storm than the light slate he'd gotten from his mother. Within those stormy irises, minute, light-gray flecks seemed to catch the light, like chips of ice.
He lifted a small hand and poked his own cheek, watching in morbid fascination as the reflection mimicked the action. This wasn't his body. He was a trespasser in the flesh of a child. Did I take over this body? Was I forced into it? Am I… in a new reality?
Before the spiraling questions could swallow him whole, the door opened. A woman entered, took one look at him standing pale and trembling by the dresser, and rushed forward with a cry.
"Aries!"
The name, the suddenness of her approach, shocked him into stillness. Before he could react, he was pulled into a tight, desperate hug, his face buried in the soft fabric of her dress. She smelled of vanilla and worry. She knelt, cupping his face in her warm, gentle hands, her rapid-fire English a torrent of loving concern.
"Aries! Oh, my darling, are you alright? Why did you get up?! You could have called me! What if you'd fallen and hurt yourself? You're still so weak from that fever—!"
He could hear the genuine love and terror in her voice, and it ignited a warmth deep in his chest that felt utterly alien. She was beautiful, with bright blonde hair and kind blue eyes. And as she spoke, an answer formed on his lips, a horrifying, instinctive betrayal of his own mind.
"Mama. Don't worry. I feel much better."
The word—Mama—felt like a stone in his mouth, yet it had slipped out with perfect, natural ease. The woman's frantic energy softened instantly into relief. "Aries. You were very sick. Even if you feel better, I want you back in bed to rest."
"But Mama—"
"No buts, young man!" Her tone was firm but loving. "Back to bed. I'll bring you some soup in ten minutes."
"Yes, Maman," he replied sullenly. The French honorific was another ghost on his tongue. He trudged back to the bed, feeling like a puppet pulled by strings he couldn't see, the body's own history moving him. He watched as she retrieved a thermometer, his mind screaming while his body obeyed.
After she left, the practiced smile she'd received vanished from his face. A chilling guilt washed over him. He was a thief. This boy, Aries, had a mother who loved him this fiercely. Had the fever killed him? Was he, Magnus, somehow responsible for hijacking this small, loved life? It was the only explanation that fit the impossible facts.
When she returned with soup, a primal hunger made him devour it. She offered to read, but he declined, feigning a tiredness that was terrifyingly real. He needed to be alone. He needed to find himself inside this whirlwind.
In the silent darkness of the room, he closed his eyes and tried to retreat to the quiet center of his own mind, to find the man he used to be.
It was a catastrophic mistake.
The moment he looked inward, the floodgates broke. A torrent of memories—not his memories—crashed against the fragile walls of his consciousness. There was no defense. It wasn't a thought, but a drowning. The love for Maria. The trust in a kind man named Henry. The bone-deep loneliness of an orphanage. The pure, explosive joy of being wanted.
He gritted his teeth as the psychological tearing became a physical agony. His small body trembled violently, his breath coming in ragged gasps, sweat soaking his pajamas. Two lives, two souls, were tearing each other apart inside one small skull. The world grayed at the edges as his mind simply shattered under the strain.
His last coherent thought was not his own, but a prayer born of the child's love and the man's guilt—a desperate plea sent from the intruder to the displaced.
Let me be worthy of the love he should have had.
Then, darkness claimed him once more.
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P.S- Hey , this is the first story that I have written and I would love to have some feedback(both positive and constructive criticism ) from you . And also do like and follow the story as it motivated me to write more and better stories for you . Thank You !